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The Daily is a one-way channel

So I’ve now spent a little while with The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad “newspaper.”

The first thing I wanted to do was tell the editors about an error I found on their website, which right now reports their launch date as Jan. 17, 2011. (The Daily launched today, Feb. 2.) There’s a standard contact form on the website, so I used that, but really, I wanted to contact the editors through their app, which would sorta make sense. But there’s no way to do so that I could find — no masthead page, no contact us page, nowhere to report errors or find corrections or anything of the sort.

There are comments on each page so I posted a comment on the “front page” reporting the error. It will be interesting to see whether the editors are reading the (voluminous and as far as one can tell unmoderated) comments.

The Daily may be a “digital” outfit, but a half hour’s inspection of it reveals a product almost hermetically sealed off from its user base. There is no way to email the editors or even find out who they are. (Even offline pubs provide their staff emails these days!)

There are no links of any kind in the content. Reading it feels like a spin in the Wayback Machine. I guess News Corp. thinks that’s what people want? But surely, for $30 million, Murdoch could at least have gotten something a little more up-to-date — with, say, the mid-90s?

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